I hate to break it to you, but Donald Trump isn’t going to make America great again. He doesn’t have the insight or courage to stand up to the financial elite, and he’s insufferably authoritarian. This is not a recipe for greatness.

Democrats are even worse. At the most ideal moment possible, the party was gifted an energetic populist movement primed for activism thanks to a non-Democrat who unified tens of millions of Americans sick of the ways thing were going, but couldn’t get behind Trump. How did the party respond? By rigging its primary and forcing down our collective throats one of the most corrupt, unethical, political monsters in American history. Afterwards, how did the party respond following her loss to Donald Trump? By making zero meaningful changes in party leadership, by endlessly propagating CIA-fueled Russia conspiracy theories and by very publicly rejecting Bernie Sanders and his supporters by choosing Tom Perez to run the DNC (for more read this excellent article).

As demented as many of Trump’s views are, at least he’s talking about shaking up the system. The only things Democrats have done since the election is attempt to co-opt Bernie Sanders, dress in all white and hyperventilate about Russia. The party is so worthless, it doesn’t even deserve to exist anymore. Then there’s the corporate media. The elitist propaganda mouthpieces that are even more destructive than our two deranged political parties, and that’s saying a lot. We are in big trouble as a people.

The past 36 hours have been really telling. The reaction to two events have demonstrated to me just how much trouble this country is in. The first event revolves around Trump’s speech to Congress. I watched the speech, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Like his critics, who falsely claim Trump is the root of all evil as opposed to a symptom of an evil system, Trump appears more interested in targeting symptoms as opposed to the core problems. While “draining the swamp” is a great slogan, he shows no intention of actually doing it. Rather, he’s filled his economic advisor positions with a cadre of particularly gross parasitic Wall Street cretins. This wasn’t the surprising part of Trump’s speech, however. The truly surprising, and disturbing part, was the tremendous praise heaped upon him by the corporate media afterwards, further proving the point that corporate media is worthless.

Why did the corporate media like the speech so much? Mainly it had to do with the moment Trump honored Carryn Owens, the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens. Will this standing ovation do anything to improve the lives of struggling Americans? Does it tell us anything at all about how Trump will handle foreign policy and out of control militarism in order to prevent deaths like this going forward? Of course not. What it tells you is that all the corporate media cares about is pomp and circumstance. Corporate media is obsessed with the show, the red carpet, with superficiality. Even if you loved the speech, it was a freakin’ speech. I’m not comparing Trump to such men, but most of the most heinous thugs in human history were great at giving speeches. Actions, not words are what matter, as we should have learned from eight years of Obama.

Moving along, the second event that solidified to me the amount of trouble we’re in as a nation relates to Jeff Sessions. As all of you already know based on my recent posts, I think Jeff Sessions is a dangerous, disconnected, goon. A fossil from another era, a hypocrite, and a terrible choice for Attorney General. That said, I think the controversy about what he told Congress related to his meetings with Russia is being blown grossly out of proportion. Here’s the clip in case you haven’t seen it:

What’s the big deal here? From what we know, he was simply a Senator who met with the Russian Ambassador publicly. These meetings consisted of one at a Heritage Foundation event in July 2016, where other ambassadors were present. The other was in Sessions’ Senate office in September.

Two months before the September meeting, Sessions attended a Heritage Foundation event in July on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention that was attended by about 50 ambassadors. When the event was over, a small group of ambassadors approached Sessions as he was leaving the podium, and Kislyak was among them, the Justice Department official said.

These encounters seem pretty transparent, it’s not as if they were slinking around back allies handing-off envelopes filled with cash. It seems obvious to me that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lying to Congress about unconstitutional government spying on American citizens was far worse, and he wasn’t forced to resign.

Proving once again that the only thing Democrats can really get passionate about is anti-Russia hysteria. A hysteria which the corporate media is likewise obsessed with, despite countless really significant domestic issues which remain unaddressed.

For example, take a look at the following images recently published by New York Magazine and The New Yorker.

Do these publications realize how utterly ridiculous they look to anyone capable of critical thought?

So what have we learned from all this? For starters, it should be abundantly clear by now that no one is coming to save us, and no one will be making America great again for us. We need to focus on making ourselves great. Once we do that, we will be able to surmount all obstacles and make this world a better place, but don’t think the path will be easy. I think we are in for an extraordinarily bumpy ride, and the only thing we’ll be able to depend on is the decency and goodwill of our fellow citizens. The government isn’t going to save us, we need to save ourselves.